"...somebody named Cliff Schecter, an expert. Never heard of him."-Rush Limbaugh

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Lots of great Iraq articles to point to:

First, see Wes Clark's fantastic rebuke of The Bush Surge (is that like the Bob Dole post-little-blue-pill-surge?), also known as ESCALATION and alternatively known as VIETNAM REDUX (inviting Henry Kissinger to advise you on how to avoid defeat in Iraq is like having Lindsay Lohan advise you on how to avoid the clap).

Clark points out that if we need a surge in anything it is DIPLOMACY. He also points out how Bush has royally screwed the situation with Iran and Syria there:

Dealing with meddling neighbors is an essential element of resolving the conflict in Iraq. But this requires more than border posts and threatening statements. The administration needs a new strategy for the region, before Iran gains nuclear capabilities. While the military option must remain on the table, America should take the lead with direct diplomacy to resolve the interrelated problems of Iran's push for regional hegemony and nuclear power, the struggle for control of Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Isolating our adversaries hasn't worked.

This is another man who could win my support in the Democratic primaries.

Second, Matt Taibbi, who is not only a great writer but a ranter after my own heart, discusses in his new piece Hussein in The Membrane, the inherent myopia of our "corporate" culture in the burbs (in my humble opinion, where spontaneity, creativity and compassion go to be waterboarded, but I digress). It is this that allows us to be sold starting and continuing a disastrous war in a region most Americans know nothing about, based upon platitudes like "we need to make lemons out of lemonade" etc.

A small taste:

But the engine behind this entire escapade was really the great mass of ordinary Beltway apparatchiks and media creatures who cheerfully assented once the idea squirted out of Bush's mouth. You're talking about a bunch of half-bright golfers from the Virginian suburbs, people raised on Archie comics and fuzzy patriotic platitudes and old saws gleaned from William Holden war movies and their postwar corporate-executive dads. They went for the war because people they trusted told them it was a good idea, and some of them even ended up running parts of the operation, either in Iraq or in positions of responsibility here at home.

"You're talking about a bunch of half-bright golfers from the Virginian suburbs, people raised on Archie comics and fuzzy patriotic platitudes and old saws gleaned from William Holden war movies and their postwar corporate-executive dads."

*sigh*

I live in Northern Virginia and I know exactly who those assholes are. I even went to high school with Rep. Tom Davis's step kids. Bunch a stuck up elitist pricks they are indeed...